Touch screens are well known in the art to provide a means for displaying graphics and text in electronic devices and to provide a user interface means to enter commands to control the device or to perform various other functions to carry out the operation of the device. Touch screens are now becoming increasingly popular for use as displays in mobile telephones, particularly cellular telephones having integrated PDA (personal digital assistant) features and other phone operation related features. The touch screen may be of any suitable type to carry out the intended function, for example, resistive touch screens such as film-on-glass or other touch screen technology now known or future developed. The touch screens, which may also be in color, are generally designed to operate and respond to a finger touch, a stylus tap or movement on the touch screen surface. Touch screens may be used in addition to, in combination with or in place of physical keys traditionally used in a cellular phone to carry out the phone functions and features. Touching or tapping a specific point on the touch screen display will activate a virtual button, feature or function found or shown at that location on the touch screen display. Typical phone features which may be operated by touching or tapping the touch screen display include entering a telephone number, for example, by tapping or touching virtual keys of a virtual keyboard shown on the display, making a call or ending a call, bringing up, adding to or editing and navigating through an address book, and other phone functions such as text messaging, wireless connection to the global computer network and other phone functions now known or future developed.
Cellular telephones, may also be used with touch screen displays. The virtual keys on touch screen are finger operated to control the phone and to carry out various desired phone functions, for example, increasing or decreasing the listening volume, starting or ending a call, accessing speed dialing, or other various features.
One problem generally associated with the use of touch screen displays in mobile telephones, particularly cellular telephones, in which call progression or invoking and activating phone features by touching or pressing the touch screen display at specific locations is the susceptibility to accidental or unintentional activation or deactivation of phone functions such as, for example, accidentally ending a call during the course of the ongoing call due to the user touching the display screen when the phone is held in the talking position or is carried when used with a headset. The design of a cellular phone also lends itself to “one-handed” operation.
It is an object of the present invention therefore to provide means to easily activate and deactivate the touch screen of the cellular phone to prevent accidental or unintentional operation during an ongoing call.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a touch screen lock that has an active mode to lock the touch screen from operation and a deactivated mode to make the touch screen active for operation.
It is a yet further object of the invention to provide means to alert the user that the touch screen lock is in an active state or a deactivated state.
It is a still further object of the present invention to solve the aforementioned problems and provide an apparatus and method in a touch screen mobile phone for activating and deactivating the touch screen of the mobile phone by pressing on the touch screen surface to cause the touch screen lock to be in an active state or deactivated state to prevent accidental or unintentional operation or allow phone feature operation during an ongoing call.